A new year, another reminder of how wildly incompetent and irreparably dangerous the Chicago Police Department remains. On Thursday, after a week of coast-to-coast news about extrajudicial police killings, the Chicago PD finally released bodycam footage showing that 13-year-old Adam Toledo had dropped a handgun and began raising his hands less than a second before a cop shot and killed him in March.
That is very different from what Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy said just last weekend, when he asserted that footage showed the seventh-grader stopping during his confrontation with Officer Eric Stillman, but refusing to show his hands. While Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx now says her prosecutor was not “fully informed,” he went so far as to say that Toledo, who is Latinx, turned towards Stillman, who is white, with a gun.
Now that the footage is out it begs the same question cops and prosecutors always seem to: Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?
ADVERTISEMENT
“We live in a city that is traumatized by a long history of police violence and misconduct,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on Thursday at a press conference calling for peace following the release of the footage. “So while we don’t have enough information to be the judge and jury of this particular situation, it is certainly understandable why so many of our residents are feeling that all too familiar surge of outrage and pain. It is even clearer that trust between our community and law enforcement is far from healed and remains badly broken.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Lightfoot, who defied the police department’s initial hesitation to release the video, seemed more concerned with civilians lashing out than she did about her police department’s blatant disregard for life.
As a candidate running to replace her disgraced predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, Lightfoot claimed to be something different. She touted her progressive values when she pushed for a police reform plan that called for cities to put more money into social services and better enable police chiefs to hold their officers accountable. But earlier this year, activists have called her out for allegedly abandoning such stances after derailing multiple opportunities for the Chicago City Council to confront her administration on civilian police review.
In light of a traumatic video showing a teen with his hands up being killed, Lightfoot’s calls for civility feel tone-deaf and toothless. How can she expect her city to be peaceful when the very institution she was elected to hold accountable is, yet again, not being held to account? Her “we don’t have enough information” rhetoric felt more dismissive than empathetic. It’s almost as if she forgot what era we are currently living in. America in 2021 doesn’t have much trust in law enforcement, and almost none in politicians. It’s no time to talk about how we need to “trust the process.”
Chicago is still reeling from the betrayal of Emanuel, who fought to keep the public from watching the killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager shot 16 times by the police in 2014. As recently as 2019, the city tried to block local television stations from airing footage of a botched police raid that year in which they held an innocent, naked Black woman who wasn’t allowed the decency of covering until after she was arrested.
For things to seem so similar under Lightfoot, who pledged to bring representative and substantial change to the city on her “woke” watch, as they did under Emanuel is another reminder that government-led progressive reform will not be the solution to the people’s ills. Yes, Lightfoot had called for the video’s release, but that’s peanuts given the institutional power she holds. She could have condemned Murphy for misleading the public. She could say milquetoast responses to unjust policing will change immediately. Instead, she asked Chicagoans who have endured decades of that unjust policing to remain calm in response to an outrageous, appalling situation that demands anything and everything but that.
Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a figure often praised for his nonviolent stances, once said “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Chicagoans have not been heard, and they just may speak loudly enough now to drown out their mayor’s nonsense.
